All Chapters of Rebirth; it’s too late, Dear ex: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

200 Chapters

Irish’s warning

Kara’s POV. “She’s going for Maren,” I said out loud, and Xavier had already pulled a U-turn before I finished the sentence. “Address,” he said. I had it memorized. I had memorized every address that mattered to this case the same way I had memorized my father’s handwriting, without trying, just by looking at it long enough and understanding what it would cost to forget. I gave it to him and he drove and I called Maren. It rang four times. Five. “Pick up,” I said under my breath. “Pick up, pick up.” She answered on the sixth ring, her voice thick with sleep. “Hello?” “Maren, listen to me carefully.” I kept my voice even and low. “Don’t go to your door. Don’t open it for anyone. We’re seven minutes away. Can you get somewhere inside the apartment that isn’t near the front entrance?” A pause. I heard her breathing change, the shift from confused to alert that happens when someone who has spent twenty years being afraid recognizes that the fear has arrived again. “I’m in the be

The divorce is finalized

Kara’s POV. “It’s done,” Ashford said. “The divorce was finalized twenty minutes ago. Jeremy’s team withdrew the last contested point this morning. You are no longer married to Jeremy Devonte.” I was standing at Xavier’s kitchen window when the call came. The morning was pale and quiet and I had been awake for an hour already, drinking coffee I had made in his kitchen because he had the right kind and because making it had felt like a normal human thing to do after a night that had been anything but. “Thank you,” I said to Ashford. “For everything you did to move it cleanly.” “The documentation made it straightforward,” he said. “The poison records alone made contesting it untenable.” A pause. “How are you?” It was such a simple question. People kept asking it and it kept meaning something different every time. “I’m good,” I said. “I’m genuinely good.” I hung up and stood at the window and held my coffee with both hands and let it land. Two years of marriage, two lifetimes of co

The affair story

Kara’s POV. “It changes the scope of everything,” I said. “Elena, what did you find?” “Not over the phone.” Her voice was tight in a way I hadn’t heard from her before. Elena Voss was not a woman who got rattled easily. She had been investigating financial crime for twelve years and she talked about corruption the way other people talked about weather, calmly and without surprise. Whatever she had found in the last hour had gotten through her composure. “Come to my office. Now if you can.” “Two hours,” I said. “I have something I can’t move.” “Two hours,” she said. “Don’t be late.” I lowered the phone and looked at Xavier. “Something new,” I said. “She won’t say what. But she’s shaken.” He absorbed that without reaction. “We go after the meeting with Ashford.” We did. But before we could get there, my phone lit up with something I had been expecting and had prepared for and still felt land like a stone dropped into still water. Three words from a press contact I had cultivated

The internet

Kara’s POV. “I think I know who was driving the other car,” I read the message out loud to Xavier. He was already reaching for his jacket. “Meet him tonight.” “No.” I set the phone down. “Not tonight. Not on his timeline and not before I talk to Elena.” I looked at Xavier steadily. “Jeremy has been useful. He has also been wrong about things he was certain of his entire life. Whatever he found in Irish’s files, I need the full picture from Elena first so I can verify it independently before I walk into a room with that information and react to it.” Xavier looked at me for a moment. Then he sat back down. “You’re right.” “I know.” I typed back to Jeremy: Tomorrow. I’ll contact you after my morning meetings. Don’t move anything from where you found it. His response came in seconds: Understood. Be careful, Kara. I stared at those two words for a moment. Be careful. From Jeremy Devonte. The man who had fed me poison with my morning coffee for months in a previous life. People conta

Damian’s next move

Kara’s POV. “She took her passport,” Xavier said. “Which means she’s not running to a hotel across town. She’s leaving the country.” “Or she wants Jeremy to think she is.” I was already calling Ashford. “Irish Devonte does not panic. She plans. If she picked up her passport it’s because she wants someone to know she picked up her passport.” Ashford picked up on the first ring. “Irish has left the Devonte residence,” I said without preamble. “I need you to flag her passport with your legal contacts at the state department. Not to stop her. I want to know if she actually attempts to use it.” “I’ll make the call in the next ten minutes,” he said. I hung up and looked at Xavier. “If she’s genuinely running, it means she knows the hearing is lost. If she’s performing a run, she’s trying to draw our attention away from something else that’s moving.” “What would be moving?” he asked. “Damian,” I said. Xavier went still. I had not thought about Damian Cooker in three days. That was t

Follow the money

Kara’s POV. “I didn’t come to negotiate,” Slate said. “I want you to know that upfront.” “Then why are you here?” I asked. He was in the passenger seat and I was beside him and the driver was separated from us by a partition that was closed. The car was not moving. That was the first thing I had checked when I got in. Still at the curb. Engine running but going nowhere. Good. He looked older than he had at the restaurant. The composure was still there but it was thinner now, the way expensive fabric looks when it’s been worn too many times and is beginning to show the structure beneath it. “The story,” he said. “Elena Voss’s story. It’s live.” “I know,” I said. “I cleared it.” He absorbed that without reacting. “There are things in it that are accurate and things that will be very difficult to dispute in court.” He paused. “There are also things about the accident that I need you to understand came from a context you don’t have the full picture of.” I looked at him. “Then give

The manufactured friendship

Kara’s POV. “Twelve hours,” Xavier said the moment he reached me. He had read Ashford’s message over my shoulder before I could say a word. “That’s what they’re counting on. That we’re not ready.” “We’re ready,” I said. “Are we?” He looked at me directly. Not challenging. Checking. The way he always did when something important was about to happen, making sure we were both seeing the same board. I thought through it fast. The drive. The confession letter. Maren’s notarized statement. Brittany’s formal cooperation. Arthur’s declaration. Slate’s voluntary statement which he was delivering to Ashford tonight. The forensic handwriting analysis. Elena’s story, already live and spreading, already part of the public record. “We’re ready,” I said again. More certain this time. He nodded once. “Then we work tonight and we walk in tomorrow morning and we finish this.” We went to Ashford’s office. He was already there when we arrived, tie loosened, papers spread across every surface, the p

Lunch with a monster

Kara’s POV. “Victoria was on the same flight,” I said out loud in the dark of my bedroom. I sat up. Irish and Victoria, together, on a plane that left two hours ago. While I was in Slate’s car. While we were building the case file. While the story was going live and spreading across every platform and making both of their names something the world was now actively searching. They ran together. That told me something I hadn’t fully understood until this moment. Victoria was not just a weapon Irish had aimed and fired. She was not an independent operative who had been hired and used and discarded. She was someone Irish trusted enough to run with when everything collapsed. That was a different kind of relationship entirely. I called Xavier. He picked up on the first ring which meant he hadn’t slept either. “I saw the message,” he said. “They’re together,” I said. “Not coincidentally on the same flight. Together. Irish took Victoria when she ran.” “Which means Victoria knows eve

What Arthur knows about Victoria

Kara’s POV. “He’s here,” Xavier said quietly as we pulled into the courthouse parking area. “Look.” I looked. Jeremy Devonte was standing on the courthouse steps in a grey suit, alone, no legal team visible, no PR handler, no Brittany. Just a man standing in the early morning cold looking like someone who had made a decision and was living in the specific stillness that comes right after. He saw our car. He didn’t move toward it. He just waited. “He came,” I said. “He came,” Xavier confirmed. I got out of the car and walked toward the steps. Xavier stayed a half step behind me, close enough to matter, far enough to let this be what it needed to be. Jeremy looked at me when I reached the bottom step. His face was different from every version of it I had catalogued across two lifetimes. Not the charming performance of the man I had worked for. Not the cold calculation of the man who had served me divorce papers. Not even the fractured guilt of the man calling from outside my buil

Father and son

Kara’s POV. “All parties present,” the clerk said. “The Honorable Judge Warren presiding.” The courtroom was small by courthouse standards. Eight rows of gallery seating, half of them filled. Elena Voss was in the third row with a notepad and the specific stillness of a journalist who had waited eighteen months for this room. Jeremy was near the back, alone, looking at his hands. I was at the plaintiff’s table with Ashford on my left and Xavier directly behind me in the first gallery row where I could feel his presence without turning around. The judge entered. He was in his sixties, silver-haired, deliberate in the way of a man who had spent decades measuring the weight of words before he said them. He settled into his chair and looked at the room and then he looked at me specifically and I held his gaze without flinching. Whatever call he had received this morning, whatever pressure had been applied, he had chosen to open these doors. That told me enough. “We’re here on the mat

1 2 3 4 5 6

...

SCAN CODE TO READ ON APP